Dismissing allegations that there was ‘deliberate delay’, Karnataka Lokayukta Justice N Santosh Hegde on Sunday said his team is working toward finalising the second and final report on illegal mining in the State, to be released this month.
Speaking to PTI here, Mr. Hegde rejected allegations by some opposition Congress leaders of “deliberate delay” in finalising the report.
“I have got a team of four people working on it. There are thousands and thousands of pages involved in it.
Therefore, there has been some delay, and certain political parties are attributing motives and I don’t care a damn about anybody”, he said.
Mr. Hegde, a member of the joint committee drafting the Lokpal bill, explained that unlike the first report submitted by him to the Government in December 2008, this time a lot of information needed to be collated.
He noted that in recent months, CBI and Central Empowered Committee also made enquiries (on the illegal mining in Karnataka) and there were a series of Income Tax department raids in March.
“They (CBI, CEC and IT department) agreed to give us some inputs; we agreed to give them some inputs”, Mr. Hegde, a former Supreme Court judge, said referring to “some delay” in compiling the report.
“People should understand that there are (Lokayukta) people who are working on Sundays...day and night (to complete the report). Main reason is we can’t have more people (working on it) because then other issues will come up such as ‘oh! report is leaked’ and all that,” Mr. Hegde said.
He said the report would be submitted to the Government this month itself.
While the first report talked about all kinds of illegal mining in the State, the latest one would have “number of names involved in it”.
Lokayukta’s final report is much awaited in Karnataka and widely believed to be “politically explosive”, but Mr. Hegde declined to talk about specifics at this stage.
“The State government has not acted upon it (the first report). Consequently, the damages have been happening every day,” Mr. Hegde said.
